A protester carries a poster at a mass demonstration condemning Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his handling of hostages held by Hamas in Gaza, in Tel Aviv on September 1, 2024. Credit – David Silverman—Getty Images
THere’s a word that Israelis have not used to describe their Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, until now. Yesterday, it was everywhere: in red on handmade signs at protests that have broken out across the country, on angry social media posts in Hebrew, and in the mouths of outraged citizens:
“Murderer.”
The verdict followed the bitter news on what should have been a joyous first day of school, September 1. Not only were six more Israeli hostages found dead in Gaza, the details of their deaths shocked the country to its core. All six were killed just hours before Israeli soldiers found their bodies. The army said they all died of multiple gunshot wounds to the head, apparently by execution.
Hersh Goldberg-Polin, 23, Eden Yerushalmi, 24, Ori Danino, 25, Almog Sarusi, 27, Alex Lobanov, 32, and Carmel Gat, 40, had survived as hostages for nearly a year. When their bodies were discovered in a tunnel in southern Gaza, many Israelis blamed Netanyahu for their deaths and said they would still be alive if the prime minister had agreed to a ceasefire to free them.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Dudu Cohen, 73, who traveled with his wife from the West Bank settlement of Efrat to the protest outside the prime minister’s office in Jerusalem. “It’s terrible. If there had been a deal last week, they would still be alive.”
Something broke for many Israelis on Sunday. The reaction to the deaths was spontaneous and widespread. About half a million people took to the streets, demonstrated on bridges, blocked highways and marched through cities across the country in what were likely the largest protests since Oct. 7. The country’s largest labor union, the Histadrut, announced a strike for Monday. Someone painted “Netanyahu is a murderer” on one of the prime minister’s cars.
“I directly accuse our prime minister of murder,” Ido Bruno, a professor of industrial design and former director of the Israel Museum, said over the shouting at the Jerusalem protest. “While Hamas was the one who pulled the trigger, Netanyahu was the one who wrote the verdict. He executed them.”
Netanyahu claimed that “Israel has been in intensive negotiations with the mediator in a last-ditch effort to reach a deal” to retrieve the hostages. But Israel’s Channel 12 News reported Friday that Netanyahu had given up on the talks. During Israel’s war cabinet meeting on Thursday, Netanyahu reportedly told Defense Minister Yoav Gallant that keeping Israeli soldiers along Gaza’s border with Egypt (known as the Philadelphi Corridor) was more important than saving the lives of the remaining hostages in Gaza. A shouting match ensued, with Gallant reportedly saying, “The meaning of this is that Hamas does not agree to it, so there will be no agreement and no hostages will be released,” to which Netanyahu reportedly replied, “This is the decision.”
While much of the world is concerned about the staggering death toll among Palestinians in Gaza, with some 40,000 reported dead, Israelis remain focused on the fate of the 250 hostages captured in the enclave on October 7, when Hamas launched a surprise attack that killed some 1,200 people in Israel. Dozens of the captives were recovered in an earlier prisoner exchange and a few in rescue operations, but some 100 remain in Gaza, a third of whom are considered dead by Israeli authorities.
Bruno, like many other Israelis, accuses Netanyahu of blocking a deal with Hamas to release them, because it would lead to defections from the coalition government that relies on far-right parties. “He has done everything in his power for the last 11 months to prevent any kind of deal,” Bruno said. “It is very clear that his only interest is to continue the war as long as possible, because that is the only way he can stay in power.”
The recent deaths of the six hostages expose the deep divide in Israeli society. There is a divide between those who would prefer to continue the military operation in Gaza and those who believe that the state has a moral obligation to first and foremost bring home those who have been robbed from their beds, from the Nova festival or from their workplace.
“People will not rest until they have (Hamas leader Yahya) Sinwar’s head on a stick, but it’s not worth the price and it won’t happen anytime soon,” said Na’ama Kenan, a tech worker and mother of two, at the protest in Jerusalem. Kenan, 40, took turns with her husband: she went to the protest in Jerusalem while he took care of the children, and she took care of the children while he went to the protest in Tel Aviv. “I don’t understand how people have gotten to the point where they think that sacrificing people is for any cause. Sacrificing soldiers, sacrificing hostages. I can’t understand this.”
In Tel Aviv, some 300,000 people showed up to protest, carrying six “symbolic coffins.” They blocked the main road and lit a bonfire. Police threw stun grenades and fired water cannons at protesters, arresting 29 of them.
Einav Zangauker, the mother of Matan, who was kidnapped from the music festival, was on stage. Zangauker has been traveling from protest to protest for months, speaking at gatherings of as few as a few dozen people. On Sunday, she told several hundred thousand people that “Netanyahu is killing the hostages. He decided to sentence them to death.”
Of the man she says she voted for, Zangauker said: “The history books will not have enough space to record the magnitude” of the disaster he has brought upon the country and the nation. “Your time is up. I, Einav Zangauker, a Likudnik from Ofakim, tell you, it is over.”
“Take to the streets, people of Israel. Take to the streets!”
They had already done so. In Jerusalem, thousands of people shouted and blew whistles and eardrum-bursting trumpets outside the prime minister’s office. “We will not give this security cabinet a moment’s rest until all the hostages are released!” one man shouted over the loudspeaker, encouraging protesters to “Scream, scream, scream!” A mother of a hostage shared her anguish in a cracking voice: “This can’t go on, this is unreal, enough, ENOUGH!” A woman in a black dress sat down on a large rock and sobbed.
Yuval Kaminsky maneuvered through the crowd with his newborn daughter on his chest, while his wife, Yam Gal, held their two-year-old son. Kaminsky, a filmmaker, believed the news was a turning point for Israelis and wondered how a breakthrough could be achieved. “We are shocked. It is a feeling that we can no longer continue like this. Although we have been doing this for a long time. We are just waiting for an excuse to go out and end this once and for all. Because it will not end without people taking to the streets.”
There was a sense of powerlessness amid the unity, however, as public opinion had failed to move the country’s political leaders for months. Kaminsky said something extreme was needed to bring about change. “We don’t need a wave of protests. We need one, a really big one … and a bit of violence, I think. That’s how these things go, apparently,” he said. “I don’t think I’m advocating physical violence, but … it has to be aggressive, very aggressive. Damage to property.”
Among the dead were two hostages who became icons in Israel: Hersh Goldberg-Polin and Carmel Gat. Hersh, the Israeli-American seen in a video on October 7 with his arm severed in the back of a Hamas pickup truck, was presumed dead until Hamas released a video of him alive in April. Photos of him adorn everything from balconies to bus stops in Jerusalem. His mother, Rachel, had become an international ambassador for the hostage families, calling on the government to agree to a deal to save both the nation and her son. Carmel Gat was taken hostage from Kibbutz Be’eri and taught other hostages yoga and meditation to help them survive captivity.
“People felt very close to Hersh and Carmel without knowing them,” Bruno said. “It hits you in a different place. We can’t bear the thought that we know these people were still alive and could still be alive.”
Cohen, the settler, is one of the few Israelis who believes Israel should have accepted Hamas’s Oct. 7 offer to exchange all hostages for all Palestinian prisoners and detainees in Israeli jails. “I think we should have let them know on Oct. 8 that they had attacked us and that we were willing to make a deal of all their property for all our property,” Cohen said. “And then we had to find the opportunity to attack them as we would have to do after the hostages were back with us. There is always an opportunity to attack them. Hostages are something that is ephemeral.”
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